Apple has designed Siri AI so that we can use the iPhone without touching it. I’ve been doing the same thing on my Android phone for months.

A young Apple manager appears on the scene with a Profidén smile, very excited. “Siri is going to be much more conversational“he begins by saying. It refers, of course, to the new Siri AI that Apple has just presented. The hope—It has been difficult, we will see— is that finally Siri stop looking stupid.

After talking about some of these options, the young man is encouraged to give a demonstration in real time. Press the side button and ask Siri about World Cup match planning for the first weekend. After a few seconds – the video is honest and reflects that Siri takes a few moments to respond, like any AI – the answer appears.

The assistant suggests some dishes, but he thinks he remembers that someone mentioned a dessert from a friend. Siri, who has access to his messages and iPhone data, finds the answer and the young man asks him to plan the menu with that last dessert. You do so, and then ask Siri to set up a message to invite your chat group to the event. Soccer party set up.

Everything seems to work, and it’s a relief, because this is just what one would have expected from Siri with AI. That’s the good news. The not so good thing is that this is actually latealthough as they say, better late than never: everything that the young man showed in that video we can do on Android phones thanks to Gemini for months and even years.

I did the test on my mobile asking the same thing. It is true that it did not show me circular icons with the flags of the countries that face each other in each match (mini point for that Siri visual detail), but then I followed the same process.

So, I asked him to recommend ideas for organizing a small party to watch one of the games with friends, and he suggested a menu similar to the one Siri proposed in the Apple demo. Then he suggested that I want to add the appointment to the calendar, and when I said yes, he told me to connect my calendar to Gemini, which I had not done yet, and the same thing if I wanted to invite friends to the event: he asked me for permission to access my contacts.

Personally, I’m still not entirely comfortable with giving Gemini that access to those personal data on my phone, so the demo didn’t turn out as nice to me as it did to the Apple executive, but one thing is clear: the option is there if one wants to use it.

The arrival of Siri AI, however, is great news, because it “normalizes” something that iPhone users inexplicably could not do when it had been available on Android phones for a long time.

Copying Gemini is just what Siri needed

Actually it doesn’t normalize it at all: European citizens will not have access to Siri AI on their iPhonesbecause Apple has indicated that the European DMA prevents it. Beyond the fact that this decision is motivated by much more delicate issues (such as the obsession with maintain full control of its platform), the reality for the moment will be that.

But as we said, the arrival of Siri AI, although late, is very welcome because it confirms a paradigm shift that we are experiencing very little by little but that is infiltrating our lives: instead of touching our smartphone, we will talk to it.

AI-powered conversational voice assistants, such as Gemini or Siri AI, will allow let’s do more and more things with our mobile without having to touch it. All you have to do is talk to it to ask for them, and AI models that are increasingly capable and have increasing access to the resources of our mobile phone—not only the data we store on it, but also its applications and services—execute those requests.

It is an evolution that is slowly and progressively creeping into our mobile usage routine. It also does so with continuous improvements both in the way of interacting with these AI-powered assistants and in the ability to personalize them.

In fact, it was striking how Apple now offers a new voice for Siri AI, but above all it offers the possibility of modify that voice so that it has a different rhythm and expressiveness according to our preferences.

The options shown by Apple are not at all new. We saw it when another Apple official asked, for example, that Siri AI search for information about an upcoming concert by a group in San Francisco or when it used the system’s “visual intelligence” to identify a place in a photo.

All of this is basically a copy of what we already had on Android phones thanks to Gemini, and precisely that Google experience has been what Apple has taken advantage of to transfer all those capabilities to its devices. It’s good news.

but maybe be more for Google than for Apple.

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